"Higher-order functions are the very essence of functional programming languages – they breathe fire into the belly of the code." – Joe Armstrong

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Boston, San Francisco and SDD

My colleague Jim Lindley and I will be going to Boston for a few days for our employer. We do TDD/BDD with RSpec and Rails currently, and the folks in the Boston office are at some point along a similar continuum. We'll show them what we do, they'll show us what they do, we'll learn and grow and laugh and share and love, etc. Then I'm off to San Francisco for some interviews related to my planned relocation out there.

Yesterday, I came across a blog post by Paul Barry about SDD with Rails. The two upcoming trips already had me thinking about my workflow, and Jim and I had been talking about trying move another abstraction step up from our current speccing practice, and SDD seems like a good match for our next project. It's a rewrite of an existing app that is currently in a different language - our job would be to match it feature-for-feature and also to make some necessary changes and additions.

SDD seems like a good way to keep the QA folks who already know how the app should work more involved in the the speccing process in a way that actually has impact. That's the beauty of having the human-readable descriptions be executable.